Category Archives: revenge

Fulci Turns Back Time to Bring EVIL Back from the Dead! “The House of Clocks” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The House of Clocks” Delivers Time as an Illusion. Blu-ray now available!

An isolated Italian villa becomes the looting target for three thieves looking for an easy score.  Villa residents, an elderly couple, are tricked into letting them into their estate adorned with elegant clocks of all shapes and sizes but as the plane unfolds it goes awry when the imposing grounds man arrives and both homeowners are killed.  Yet, the villa owners were no saints and no ordinary couple as soon as the husband’s heart stops, the clocks begin to move counterclockwise and that’s when the peaceful villa turns into a strange nightmare where time goes in reverse and those short and long dead come back to life with wounds miraculously healed as if it never happened.  As time continues to reverse, the thieves find themselves trapped inside the house and on estate grounds being hunted down by the merciless grounds man, but the skeletons in the elderly couple’s closet will soon resurrect and be thirsty for vengeance.

“The House of Clocks” is the Lucio Fulci made-for-TV movie that never saw the light of television programing.  Deemed too gory and violent for public broadcast, Fulci’s 1989 Italian film, to which he created the concept for and the screenplay treated by the duo team of Gianfranco Clerici  of “Cannibal Holocaust” and Daniele Stroppa of “Delirium,” was shelved for many years until it’s eventual home video release because, as you can tell just from the high-powered Italian horror names attached to the project, the finished film would certainly frighten those general audiences with easy turn-of-the-knob and bunny ear-antenna access.  Also known natively as “La casa nel Tempo,” was a part of a four-film horror special surrounding a theme of the houses of doom and was a production of Dania Film and Reteitalia production companies with “You’ll Die at Midnight” and “Delirium” producers Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina serving as executive producers.

The film initially opens with Maria, the nosy for her own good housemaid, discovering two rotting corpses ostentatiously displayed in the villa’s chapel.  Why Maria (Carla Cassola, “Demonia” and “The Sect”) decides to snoop around is not explained but the act does start a chain events, leading up to elder Villa owners in Sara Corsini and her clock obsessed husband Vittorio, played by the role age appropriate Bettine Milne (“The King’s Whore”) and Paolo Paoloni (“Cannibal Holocaust”) in a lot more makeup and prosthetics to make him appear as an older man.  As mysterious senior citizens go, Milne and Paoloni are the malevolently cryptic under a façade of geniality, possessing and maintaining the corpses of their niece and nephew they’ve murdered in order to keep their wealth.  The backstory between the two pairs has vague clarity but there’s enough to keep the pistons pumping toward the crux of why the uncanny time about-face.  While, again, no sense of explanation on why time reverses, we’re under the assumption Paolo is essentially Father Time, a personification of the time concept represented as an old, bearded man with an hour glass and a scythe to represent a span from life to death.  When thieves Paul (Peter Hintz, “Zone Troopers”), Tony (Keith Van Hoven, “Black Demons”), and Sandra (Karina Huff, “Voices from Beyond”) put an end to the Corsinis, that is when time stops and reverses itself, affecting the once dead to return back to life, and creating a nightmare scenario for now three trapped thieves under the chase of not only the Corsinis but those also killed by the Corsinis as their deteriorating bodies rejuvenate into active flesh and bone as well as flesh and blood.  “The Beyond” and “Zombie’s” Al Cliver rounds out the principal cast and the overall cast with his menacingly evil, Corsini’s jack-of-all-trades grounds man with a scarred over eye and a double barrel shotgun to hunt down the thieves.

“The House of Clock’s” is quite an interesting concept without a durably designed reason for all the madnesses.  At its core, three thieves home invade an older couple for their valuable objects and accidently kill them in the process when the standoff goes bad.  With that oversimplified version of events, a hellish cog in the pocket watch gearbox links the old man’s ticker with the tons of tickers that adorn his villa home, causing a chain reaction of turn back the clock proportions to which audiences never receive a proper understanding and while this may bother a sample size few, most will find the story too weird, gory, and trepidatious tense to care in what becomes a fair-game free-for-all against all characters who don’t have an ounce of virtue.  The lot of thieves, schemers, and murders are all trapped inside time’s ill-reverse affect without a sign of slowing down and while it might seem advantageous at first for some, as time continues to revert, the worse the situation becomes as old adversaries emerge from their graves and tombs.  Fulci’s visualized gore also emerges through with the fantastic effects by Guiseppe Ferranti, including a high right through the crotch impalement.  Ferranti would also be behind the effects for two other the house of doom television movies.

“The House of Clocks” may not have been safe for television but for a new Cauldron Films Blu-ray, the Lucio Fulci film fits right in and comes in the nick of time!  Restored from a 2K scan of the 35mm film negative, the AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 offers a visually invigorated, audibly astounding, and special features saturated release that presents Fulci’s lesser known and once previously shelved work!  Presented in a European widescreen 1.66:1, color saturation is beyond reproach with a beautifully natural grading that pops textures and objects right off the screen, adding density and tangibility to each.  Disc capacity affords the codec compression with no artefact issues in the reproducing of the encoded image that nearly replicates an ideal exhibition and appearance of a made-for-TV movie, especially in the macabre moment where extra slimy ooziness of the decaying corpses or the perforation of the servant’s crotch area is as clear as clear can get without misinterpretation.  Skin tones aren’t flared and are naturally set within a healthy, though smoother, grain layer.  The release comes with two audio mixes – a PCM English 2.0 mono and a PCM Italian 2.0 mono.  Both tracks are produced from ADR and have been scrubbed with no issues of hissing or crackling.  There’s a brilliant touch of echoing within the estate to create reverberations and a range, open quality to the exterior dialogue.  Vince Tempera’s synth piano is a ticking measure of modified vocals and integrated milieu elements with a organ tone like quality that’s ghoulishly soft.  English subtitles are optional on both mixes.  Special features include a handful of new interviews from behind-the-camera with cinematographer Nino Celeste Lighting the House of Time, composer Vince Tempera Time and Music, first assistant director Michele De Angelis Working with a Master, FX artist Elio Terribili Time with Fulci, as well as unmentioned archival interviews with actors Paolo Paoloni, Al Cliver, and Carla Cassola.  There’s a parallel audio commentary with film historians and critics Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson, and Troy Howarth who regularly step in to commentate on Italian horror.  Graphic artist Matthew Therrien designs an illustrative composition artwork, pulling inspiration from the film’s most iconic and chaotic moments, while Eric Lee designs the titular logo sitting pretty dead center.  The reverse side of the cover art displays a rotting hand still from the movie.  The 19th title has a clear Amaray that houses a cropped version of the front cover image pressed onto the disc, which is region free, uncut, and has an 83-minute runtime.

Last Rites: Most people wish they could turn back time. For Lucio Fulci and his penchant for beyond death, going counterclockwise in “The House of Clocks” is more frightening and deadly as time can’t be owned and controlled. Simply put, there’s just no stopping the sands of time, forwards or backwards, for the past will catch up to you and the future is mercilessly uncertain.

“The House of Clocks” Delivers Time as an Illusion. Blu-ray now available!

A Young Man Has to Become Someone Else to Exact Revenge on EVIL! “The Adventurers” (Eureka Entertainment / Special Limited-Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Limited Edition “The Adventurers” Now on Blu-ray from Eureka Entertainment!

A Cambodian boy’s family is brutally murdered by the family friend and covert colleague Ray Lui, in front of him.  Alone and distraught, Wai Lok-yan is taken under the wing of his Uncle Shang, a CIA operative living in Thailand, and grows up to be a military fighter pilot still haunted by the violent death of his family.  When a newspaper headline names the now wealthy-by-gun-smuggling Ray Lui is to attend a public event, Wai Lok-yan is hellbent to kill Ray Lui at any cost, despite his career and his life, but a horribly failed assassination attempt puts his life in danger.  Uncle Shang strikes a deal with the CIA, who also want Ray Liu dead, to allow Wai Lok-yan in the United Staes in exchange to be an undercover operative named Mandy Chan, a gang boss seeking to kidnap Liu’s estranged daughter Crystal to get closer to the murderous arms smuggler.  However, what Wai Lok-yan didn’t expect in his mission was to fall in love.

The 1995 Ringo Lam gun action-thriller “The Adventurers” starring Andy Lau is in no way related to the 2017 Stephen Fung gun action-thriller “The Adventurers” also starring Andy Lau.  I just wanted to get that out there and over with.  Moving on.  Ringo Lam, director of the Jean-Claude Van Damme films “Maximum Risk,” “Replicant,” and “In Hell,” cowrites what is known in Hong Kong as a heroic bloodshed feature with “Supercop 2’s” Sandy Shaw and Kwong-Yam Yip.  Heroic bloodshed is a popular subgenre stemmed and coined from the 1980s that surrounded themes of duty, honor, and violent gunplay while embroiled in a web of drama and plot complexities that make it seem almost impossible for the hero to come out alive.  The internationally filmed production, spearheaded between China Star Entertainment and Win’s Entertainment Ltd., is produced by “Black Mask’s” Tiffany Chan and Charles Heung.

As stated earlier, Andy Lau stars as the protagonist lead playing a dueled dual life as the orphaned Woai Lok-yan seeking vengeance through the pseudonym of Mandy Chan, criminal boss infiltrating as a spy and assassin against his family’s murderer Ray Lui, played by the longstanding actor Paul Chun (“In the Line of Duty III,” “Hong Kong 1941”).  The “Internal Affairs,” Hong Kong action star Lau seizes and harbors his character’s plotted difficult choice:  to do whatever it takes to get within arm’s length trust of the man who killed his family versus falling gradually in love with that same murderer’s innocent daughter.  There’s plenty of back and forth for Lau to engage in both footsteps that teeter a line between duty, responsibility, and the heart but one side does swallow the other and in a negative way as the romance with love interest Crystal (Chien-Lien Wu, “Beyond Hypothermia”) is sorely underplayed against the Ray Lui mission and a competing love interest in Lui’s arm candy flavor of the month Mona, played by Rosamund Kwan (“The Head Hunter”).  Mona’s desperation to leave or kill Ray Lui, and subsequently be with Wai Lok-yan, is to the point of letting the mission and the love between Mandy and Crystal burn to the ground and that greatly built up and infringes upon the lack of genuine connection provided to give Mandy and Crystal a sympathetic understanding, especially when Ringo Lam’s storytelling isn’t scene successive and time is basically nonexistent.  Less detrimental to story, Mona’s subplot also does take a bite out of the whole operative mission itself, as it creates more complexities for Mandy when a gun smuggler’s woman wants out and will reluctantly do anything to achieve that goal, even backstab the Mandy who she wants to be with.  As the zippy story hits all the highlights, one downside aspect is also zipping through interesting supporting roles from David Chiang (“Murder Plot”), Ben Ngai-Cheung Ng (“The Eternal Evil of Asia”), Victor Wong (“Big Trouble in Little China,” “Tremors”), George Cheung (“Robocop 2”), Van Darkholme, Ron Yuan (“Godzilla 2000”), Phillip Ko (“Cannibal Curse”) and Andy Tse (“Naked Ambition”).

A powerfully engaging opening, heighted for full empathetic effect and visceral distress, of little Wai Lok-yan’s family being mercilessly slaughtered right before his eyes immediately has audiences on his side, especially when the boy, whose no more than 6-8 years old, bawls and collapses right into the arms of Uncle Shang shortly after the bloody aftermath.  What ensues is a flash forward to years later with Wai Lok-yan, now a grown man and a Thai fighter pilot, haunted by his past when his family’s killer Ray Lui surfaces in the paper.  At this point is where the story begins to snowball downhill, gaining speed at an inconceivable rate and growing bigger and bigger by the scene.  The action is pleasingly palatable with excellent gunplay and hand-to-hand fight choreographies that’s squib-tastically bloody and hard-hitting.  Where the story struggles typically reside, perhaps on a more subjective level, is the pacing that’s aimed to fly through the Wai Lok-yan/Mandy Chan timeline at a breakneck speed in order to capture the loops and hoops the hero has to jump through to reach Ray Lui but the way he infiltrates the public ceremony to assassinate Ray Lui, being integrated into the San Francisco Asian street gang, and even his sudden marriage to Crystal without the imprinting buildup of romance shocks the critical thinking system, tricking the brain into a stagnant state by time lapsing forward not in days or in weeks but in months or in years of time passed without the ease of a better transition to work into the time and space in-between.  Also, “The Adventurers” severe lack the motorized mayhem in the land, air, and sea, and despite the film’s select advert one sheets of Wai Lok-yan in full fighter pilot gear and his soaring adult introduction, hurts the image the film portrays that’s more grounded in melee combat or in a barrage of bullets with only bookend combat jet and helicopter sequences and a brief car chase in the middle that impress just above the par bar. 

UK label Eureka Entertainment brings to North American shelves, and audiences, a special, limited-edition Blu-ray edition of “The Adventurers,” stored onto an AVC encoded, high-resolution, 1080p, BD50.  Visual aspects on the Eureka’s brand new 2k restoration release is impeccable with a clear delineation, a sharp detail-driven style, and a clean, desaturated color scheme that’s hard, gritty, and muted, catering extensively to the intense violence and fast-paced action themes of the heroic bloodshed subgenre film.  Lam’s Dutch angles are dramatically harnessed in the Hi-Def scan with additional pixels emphasizing every element in the frame that makes the scene that more dramatic and a concentrated actioner in the anamorphic widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  Even the jetfighters are clearer and distinct with the camera and object movements that render the plane as a fighter plane rather than the vague blur that maybe is a plane or could be bird.  There are three Cantonese audio tracks, including a restored LPCM stereo, a restored DTS-HD MA 5.1, and the original unrestored stereo.  The unrestored stereo is quite indelicate with plenty of flawed rudiments that have a hard time sustaining with “The Adventurer’s” range.  The restored stereo is an efficient, effective, and adequate exaltation of the original audio track but A/V enthusiast will definitely be pleased with the surround sound DTS-HD 5.1 that completely is immersive where it counts, such as the bookend aerials and channel diffused gunplay that brings the action’ to your ears rather than your ears trying to capture the action.  The 5.1 absolutely feels more robust without being artificially broached.  Newly translated English subtitles are optionally available for an inhouse dialogue that’s clear and present at all times throughout the story.  Special features include a new audio commentary by film critic David West, a new interview with Asian Journal’s editor-in-chief Gary Bettinson Two Adventurers, unearthed archive interview with writer and producer Sandy Shaw, and the theatrical trailer.  What’ makes Eureka Entertainment’s release a limited edition is the cardboard O-card slipcase overtop the clear Blu-ray Amaray case with new artwork by Time Tomorrow, which is a composition of stills bathed in yellow and shadowed in black.  The Amaray has the more egregiously misleading original poster art of the protagonist in jetfighter attire and the New York City’s twin towers in the background for the pre 9/11 film; however, Andy Lau is only briefly in the gear during his adult character’s introduction and his character does not end up in New York City, but rather San Francisco.  A collector’s 19-page booklet resides in the insert section with color photos, more misleading promotional stills, an essay by Hong Kong cinema scholar Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park from the University of Hong Kong, film credits list, Blu-ray credits list, and tips and tricks for viewing the film properly according to your cinema setup settings.  The release is not rated, has a runtime of 110 minutes, and is encoded with a region A and B playback.

Last Rites: Eureka Entertainment brings Andy Lau back into the spotlight with a slick new transfer for “The Adventurers,” action-packed revenge bottled to be less romantic and more fervid in nature.

Limited Edition “The Adventurers” Now on Blu-ray from Eureka Entertainment!

Desert Rats Doing EVIL To Anyone Crossing Their Path! “Motorpsycho!” reviewed! (Severin Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Motorpsycho!” on a new 4K scan Blu-ray from Severin Films!

Three motorcycle hooligans on their way to Las Vegas through the Mojave Desert ride up on a smalltown Veterinarian named Cory Maddox and his voluptuous wife Gail.  A minor brush with the gang does little harm to the Maddoxes and the couple move on with their life certain the gang has moved on to the next town, but little does Cory know while on a professional checkup of a local mare, the gang invades his home and violently rapes his wife.  Hellbent for vengeance, Cory tracks their transgressive escapades through the arid landscape and comes across Ruby, a beautiful woman left for dead after her husband is gunned down and she herself being grazed by a bullet fired by the same delinquents.  The two track them down into an inescapable, unidirectional corner of the desert but with both sides facing car trouble, injury, and seeping slowly into mental instability, only one side will come out alive. 

By and large, “Motorpsycho!” is the Russ Meyer helmed B-picture that side straddles less explicit content.  The 1965 exploitational action feature, that sported less-than-speedy Honda Trials, flirted with bare-chested women, and immersed itself in light and dark innuendo, is nestled amongst two other Meyer films, “Mudhoney” and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” released the same year and are showcase of unscrupulous violence and sexual content and innately sets the stage for Meyer’s bosomy and barren set movies that bestowed the former World War II photographer turned sexploitation director accolade success later in his career with the “Vixen!” branded films.  “Motorpsycho!” is co-written by Meyer and fellow “Mudhoney” writer William E. Sprague from an original idea from the screenwriters along with James Griffith (“Russ Meyer’s Lorna”) and Hal Hopper.  The Meyers, being Russ and wife Eve, produce the story in cahoots with Ross Massbaum (“Beach House”) and is produced and distributed theatrically by Eve Meyer’s Eve Productions.

The way Meyer sequences the “Motorpsycho!” story is an ebb and flow of events that culminate into a showdown and audiences, perhaps, won’t know exactly who the leads are until well into the chaos, such as with the female principal lead Ruby, a Cajun woman down on her luck travelling in a forced by necessity marriage to an older man in order ot start a new life in California, played by Haji, a Canadian dancer with a unique face and beautiful curves who caught Meyer’s eye for “Faster, Pussycat!  Kill!  Kill!”   For a new actress, Haji is impeccable and easy on the eyes while working off another first-time actor, principal lead Alex Rocco (“The Godfather”), playing vengeful veterinarian Cory Maddox.  Haji and Maddox have unquestionable sexual chemistry and tension despite their slight platonic relationship of seeking revenge as Meyer provides a great deal of sexual innuendo and reference instead, beating around the bush for the ultimate tease.  Don’t worry, “Motorpsycho!” doesn’t hang around the coquettish scene for entire duration as there’s plenty of one-on-one racy and salivating spiciness to sate sexploitation fans between the playful bedtime arousals of Rocco and on-screen wife Lane Carroll (“The Crazies”) and the playfully aggressive rape of Carroll and a fisherman’s wife a bikini-cladded large bosom.  “Motorpsycho!” has a man to woman ratio that strays from the normal Russ Meyer credits with the female cast rounding out with Sharon Lee in her usual typecasted role of a blonde bombshell and, more specifically in this story, a mare-owning flirt for Cory Maddox’s services.  While not a large breasted woman craving sex in every episodic scenario, this Meyer run has an interesting arc for the three ruffians who initially start with copasetic unity in their troublemaking fun through the Mojave only to end themselves in disbandment of backstabbing and derangement in unswerving performances from Timothy Scott (“Lolly-Madonna XXX”) as the handheld radio melomaniac, Joseph Cellini (“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”) as a hip cat love-taker, Steve Oliver (“Werewolves on Wheels”) as their military vet leader with a stoic expression but unpredictably violent.  “Motorpsycho!” rounds out the cast with Coleman Francis (“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”), Steve Masters, Fred Owens (“Supervixens!”), George Costello and Russ Meyer as the unsympathetic, cynical Sheriff.

Not as sordidly sleazy or insatiably randy as many of the Russ Meyer films we all know and love for their perky antics, voluptuous vixens, and zany comedy with a isolated desert town backdrop, “Motorpsycho!” is virtually nudity free in comparison to his thereafter work and shot entirely in black and white that, too, tones down the situationally shaded situations of diverging sexual overdrives that conclude around a centered focus, usually around something sexually themed.  That’s not to say just because production year is in the cinema puritanical early 60s and is in black and white does that mean the film goes without a fair amount of brief nudity as Meyer slips into a couple of nipple slipping instances and countless sideboob that would be deemed too salacious for media content harking back 60-years ago.  Innuendo has always been fair game in all sorts of production sizes and studios but couple what Meyer has done with the sexualized material with the gang violence and what you have is one of the earliest known grindhouse pictures prior to its monikered labeling in the 1970s.  Production value and authenticity floats around the low-budget spectrum with a film titled “Motorpsycho!” that spends what little funds there is to supply Honda Trials that are more the speed and look of Mopeds than motorcycles, but Meyer competently adds and edits fast paced car chases, the discharging of a single pump action rifle, and a curtain calling explosion with body prop fragmenting special effects to level up the value where it counts. 

The Museum of Modern Art and Severin Films restore and scan Russ Meyer’s “Motorpsycho!” onto a new 4K transfer from the original camera negative and encode the transfer onto a new Blu-ray release as part of the Russ Meyer’s Bosomania collection.  The region free AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD25 is a perfect, snug fit for a well-endowed black-and-white feature restored to a virtually free of dust, dirt, and damage.  Meyer’s an eclectic electric editor and every transition is smooth and robust without fading reduction of quality in the rapid, rambunctious edits of his assembling panache.  Though in black-and-white, details don’t suffer from monochromic flattening and every inch of desert is captured with precision, every bodily curve is shapely contoured, and even when a resembled nights dims the lights, there’s plenty of definition of outline to let the mind do the rest of the work with textures and delineation within the presented 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio.  The English LPCM 1.0 track is about as expected, flat, but pumps through the single channel with great vitality and strength to be an effective, agreeable sound mix that, again, sees little-to-no distortion or interference.  Dialogue renders over clean and clearly without hissing or crackling in its ADR form with obvious but little asynchronous measure between visual and audio.  Closed captioning English subtitles are available.  Severin Films compiled special features, in association with the Russ Meyer Trust, include an audio commentary with queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell and “Malevolent” editor and filmmaker Zach Clark, archived interviews with stars Haji and Alex Rocco Desert Rats on Hondas, and the film’s trailer.  Primary red boxes in a mustard yellow background cover art with Steve Oliver and Sharon Lee providing the film’s genre caliber with fast bikes and big breasts plastically encased inside a black Blu-ray Amaray with the inside disc pressed with the same image, following suit to the previous first three Bosomania installments of “Vixen,” “Supervixens,” and “Beneath the Valley of Ultra-Vixens.”   The region free release has a runtime of 74-minutes.

Last Rites: “Motorpsycho!” is Russ Meyer convincing us he’s more than just a T&A sex hound with a 100% pure exploitation revved up with revenge, violence, and sordid sexual behavior.

“Motorpsycho!” on a new 4K scan Blu-ray from Severin Films!

Master Chen and his EVIL, Alien Clan Try to Take Over the Powers of the Astral Plane! “Furious” (Visual Vengeance / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get “Furious” Now on Blu-ray from Amazon.com!

After the murder of his sister who sought pursuit and protection of the astral plane power, the mourning and grief-stricken Karate instructor Simon is summoned to Master Chan’s space-age dojo where’s he’s tasked to track down four connecting pieces of a necklace artifact that will lead him to his sister’s murderer.  As soon as Simon leaves the building, his friends join his quest only to be confronted by Howard, a martial arts henchman with a throng of skilled fighter to descend upon Simon and killing his friends.  Simon finds himself in constant battle against not only Howard but also other highly skilled sub-bosses with ties to Master Chan in a devious and traitorous plot to obtain the power of the astral plane for himself.  Simon uses his Karate discipline to kick and punch his way through hordes of trained fighters to reach Master Chan to stop him and exact revenge for his sister. 

A martial arts movie with aliens, astral plans, a dragon’s head, evil fire-shooting magicians, and more, “Furious” lives up to the moniker as one punch after another action and completely ambitiously and guerrilla style on a miniscule 30K budget.  Entirely helming “Furious’s’” creative control and securing actors and stuntmen willing to take risks on their own accord and dime are USC film students Tim Everitt (visual effects animator and composite artist who would go on to work on “Deep Blue Sea” and “Red Planet”) and Tom Sartori (a career film editor) looking to break into the film industry with their own rapscallion production of a marketable chopsocky genre film at the tail end of its string of success coming out of the 1970s and into the early 1980s when horror began it’s rise.  Everitt and Sartori produced the all-American made martial arts production with funding from a motel entrepreneur.

At the center of “Furious” are two Korean-American brothers, Simon and Phillip Rhee, experts in Karate and dojo sensei who, like Everitt and Sartori, were looking break into the business.  The California-born Rhee brothers play the protagonist and antagonist roles with Simon playing the namesake hero thrust into doing evil’s biding while avenging his sister’s death and Phillip donning Master Chen’s white hair and manically, ruthless plot to exploit not only Simon to obtain astral plane summoning necklace pieces but also his henchmen who carry the pieces that must hold the essence of death.  Virtuosos in karate, the Rhee brothers show and pull off incredible difficult moves done practically, especially in the early 1980s without the help of high-flying wires and only a little help with some camera angle movie magic.  The sparring is fast and realistic without being pull-punching obviousness.  All of the sound was done in post, so the Rhee’s real voices are not used to either replicate the martial arts jagged voice synchronicity or sound design was not in the budget.  Likely, a little of both.  The lower-level bosses are a medley bunch and have a range of talents from a staff wielding wilderness man (Bob Folkard), to a tiger style soul fighter (Howard Jackson, “The Delta Force”), to a crazed wizard (Mika Elkan) with flaming projectiles Simon has deal with, one-on-one, in order to reach the pyramidal top, Master Chen.  “Furious” is purely an action film, casting no love interest for Simon resulting in no emotional or romantical arch.  The former is emphasized more intently by Simon’s lack of expressiveness for revenge; there’s a sliver of poignant energy when Simon has visions of his dead friends’ severed heads served to him on a food platter that could warrant retribution attributions.  Jon Dane, John Potter, and Joyce Tilley who are quicky established as character friends to Simon and are equally as quickly dispatched to place Simon in a world of loneliness against an aliens and evil karate master alliance for astral plane domination.

From the depths of Tubi comes a curation for the ages release of “Furious” for the first time ever having a proper package that’s not related to pornography, as was the first and only VHS issuance by VCII, a well-known adult film distributor at the time who released “Debbie Does Dallas.”  “Furious” is an odd, unpredictable, mashup of throwing darts to see what sticks and in that volatility, anticipation of what’s to come next is considerably high, especially when a shoestring budget production surprisingly opens with incredible helicopter shots tracking a foot chase sequence.  From there, “Furious’ keeps astonishment alive with high-level increments of bizarre alien in human skin behavior, punitive human to animal transformations, talking pigs, astral plane battles, Superman flying, and Devo band mania coupled with extensive and coherent editing to flesh out a feature on the front and back ends.  Granted, the plot’s very puzzling and motives are dubious at best to why Master Chen would task a competent fighter like Simon to track down pieces of a unifying necklace when Chen’s own men possess all of them and could easily have killed them himself for the death essence.  There’s also the alien aspect that goes by the wayside in a lack of explanation or exposition by jumping into assumption just by weird behaviors and flashy, ultra-modern buildings to serve as extraterrestrial evidence.  Even with that ambiguity, seeing Simon Rhee perform a triple-hit kick amongst a slew of other highly impressive stunts and special effects relative to the budget has “Furious” become a cult fan favorite. 

Visual Vengeance curates another title from out of the shadows and into our Blu-ray players with “Furious,” encoded with AVC, presented in a high-definition 1080p of the original fullscreen aspect ratio 1.33:1, on a BD50.  Sourced from the original tape elements, which I’m assuming was the original VHS release a few years later as the film was shot on an Arriflex camera that used film stock, the Blu-ray contains a new, director-approved SD master print.  Cleaned up to get some color saturation into the anemic picture, the image doesn’t look as washed as the monochromic qualities of VHS and this is a vast improvement in picture quality as well with some better delineation around objects.  There’s quite a bit of aliasing and ghosting that leaves object trails and rough edging but not enough to warrant visual concern for texture properties, such as the pig stubble or the decapitated heads on a pater that show coarseness where it matters.  Print damage, such as virtual scratches and some rough editing room splices and re-tapings, are present but not profound.  All of this is covered in the technical forewarning, regularly at the beginning of ever Visual Vengeance film so the expectation is set.  The English language LPCM stereo is all postproduction additions with ADR and foley artistry.  The first instances of dialogue don’t come up in the mix until the 13-minute mark, leaving much of the opening left to Foley work to build kinetic and atmospheric sound.  With any early postproduction work, three will always be space in between the synchrony and that can be said here but on slightly jagged edge which says something positive about Everitt and Sartori’s handling of the audio track.  Optional English subtitles are available.  Obscurity doesn’t mean less supplement goodies either and Visual Vengeance has proved that over time again and again with their amazing stockpile of exclusive and archived special features.  New interviews with directors Tom Sartori, High Kicking in Hollywood, and Tim Everitt, The Kung Fu Kid begin the exclusive content with length editing discussions from the directors about their time before, during, and after “Furious.”  Filmmaker and podcaster Justin Decloux provides a slew of material, including a feature length commentary, cohosted with Peter Kuplowsky of Toronto International Film Festival.  Decloux does a pair of video essays – North American No-Budget Martial Arts Cinema Primer and Rhee Brothers career overview. The buck doesn’t stop there with an archive commentary with co-director Tim Everitt, an archive podcast with Everitt circa 2013, Super 8 behind-the-scenes footage of “Furious,” Scorched Earth Policy 1987 EP with full six tracks, Cinema Face live in concert, Tom Sartori’s 80’s music video reel and Super 8 short films, original film trailers, and Visual Vengeance trailers. That’s not all! New slipcover artwork brings together an illustrated compilation of what to expect with the same art on the inside Amaray case. The cover art is reversible, depicting the original VHS cover art that’s not as charismatic, or good. Insert section houses a folded mini-poster reproduction of the original one sheet, a double-sided acknowledgement advert with alternate art, Visual Vengeance’s retro VHS sticker sheet, and a ninja star keychain accessory! The 17th Visual Vengeance title comes region free, has a runtime of 73 minutes, and is unrated.

Last Rites: Anomalously action-packed with a fantasy element, “Furious” is a one-of-a-kind, indie martial arts production that has everything, even the kitchen sink, thrown at with a journeyman tale of alien butt-kicking, astral plane dogfighting, and anthropomorphic black arts.

Get “Furious” Now on Blu-ray from Amazon.com!

EVIL Manga to EVIL Movie! “Liverleaf” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“LIverleaf” Pushes Through the Bleak to Shine. On DVD Now!

The move from Tokyo to a dwindling rural town hasn’t been easy for middle schooler Haruka.  Most of her classmates have grown up with each other and formed vicious cliques that bully her relentless during and after school.  Mitsuru Abu, a photography enthusiast and Haruka’s classmate is also an outsider but has family ties to the area, is about her only friend and whom she finds attractive.  Upon returning home after spending the day together, Haruka finds her family home engulfed in flames, her mother and father dead, and her little sister severely burned over her entire body.  The loss of her family, her only emotional support, mentally compromises Haruka’s self-control and sends her spiraling into a revenge fueled murdering spree, targeting her bullying classmates who had a hand in the inferno of her family home.  The root of malevolence is not as it appears on the surface, and it will be up to Haruka to kill her way in finding the truth and reveal the secrets.

Adapted from the popular manga series, “Misu Misō,” written by Oshikiri Rensuke, the film version incorporates the indelicate dramas of being a school age teen in while reproducing faithfully the graphic gore, violence, and disturbing nature of character of the series in great detail.  Titled “Liverleaf,” as in the resilient, mountainous found three-lobe leafed flower that resembles the human liver and can withstand harsh winter conditions, is helmed by “Let’s Make the Teacher Have a Miscarriage Club” director Eisuke Naitô and penned by Miako Tadano of “The World of Kanako,” another manga-based film adaptation.  The 2018 film, which can be described as a revenge-drama with particle elements of horror, is shot in one of the snow-covered foothills of Japan’s mountain regions and is produced by Shigeto Arai (“We Are Little Zombies”) under the production banners of the Nikkatsu Corp. and the L’espace Film Co.

Anna Yamada is in the lead role that’s very familiar and culturally significant to Japanese cinema.  A scorn-born femme fatale that’s merciless and personnel, the kind of role that Quentin Tarantino exacted in his tribute to Asian revenge narrative with “Kill Bill,” starring Uma Thurman, hunting down the offending party and dispatching the scum from the Earth in a one-by-one fashion.  The “Suicide Forest Village” actress Yamada headlined “Liverleaf” as mid-to-late teen portraying the manga series’ preteen or early teenage girl Haruka Nozaki.  She isn’t the only nearly adult woman to play a teen in the throes of hormones, peer pressures, and angsty conditions sideswiped by wickedness and a taste for dominance as the whole student body pretends to be a youthful waste in a snowy, mountainside village on the verge of collapse.  Howling Village’s Rinka Ôtani, as Taeko Oguro, stands out with her bright orange hair and a sense of indifferent authority being the supposed head of the gaggle of bullying girls.  “Liverleaf” is Ôtani debut picture and Ôtani would eventually reteam with Yamada on “Suicide Forest Village,” but their first dichotomized performance as protagonist and antagonists brings a palpable tension to the screen.  Throw a boy both girls stoically can’t admit with a lot of expression and that pressure pot grows into an ugly shape of jealousy spurred love triangle.  Mitsuru Aibe is tall, handsome, kind, and a photography buff always looking for the raw and beautiful moment to capture on film.  Played by Hiroya Shimizu, “The World of Kanako” and “Sadako” actor instills that hope for the future and a glance of stability amongst the opposing craziness that has ensued between the rebirthed revenger Nozaki and the horrible highschoolers now fearing for their lives because of their responsible part for the monster they’ve created but does he really provide a safer, greener pasture Nozaki needs to return to once her retribution is complete?  Kenshin Endô, Masato Endô, Reiko Kataoka, Seina Nakata, Arisa Sakura, Aki Moita, Minoir Terada, Kazuki Ôtomo, and ReRena Ôtsuka are cast in one messed up and depressive high school student body that ends in a blizzard of bloodshed.

One thing about “Liverleaf,” if looking at and considering all the components of the feature as a whole, to take away from the adaptation is how Eisuke Naitô facsimiles the plot points of a manga series or, in more general terms, Naitô” has plucked the rudimentary concepts straight from any regular extreme manga series, not just from Oshikiri Rensuke’s Misu Misō.  Yet, “Misu Misō” is very faithfully extracted from the illustrated pages for live action execution down to many of the details with very few changes to the story’s original design. Gore has an extreme graphic nature juxtaposed against the snow, contrasting in homage to those historical revenge genre films set in the same harsh, white blanket, and like all the heroines, or anti-heroines, Haruka Nozaki speaks her soul in her outfit, dressed in a continuously deepening red after each gruesome dispatch of her classmates.  This saturation into crimson extends into this belief that Nozaki is bordering being supernatural, like most condemned women done wrong, who somehow find the superhuman strength, endurance, know-how, and resilience in their own disdain for blood and violence to slay beyond their normal means without batting an eyelash.  “Liverleaf” is not the chippiest of narratives with a coursing core of grim doom and gloom through a quickly dilapidating little town with an austere school, junk pits, and modest structures that inhabit indifferent teachers, brooding teens, and a mental illness that ranges from inherent sociopathy to social sociopathy of peer pressures and bullying. 

SRS Cinema brings manga pen and paper to the big screen with their unrated DVD release of the film adaptation titled “Liverleaf.”  The MPEG2 encoded, upscaled 1080p, DVD9 release is presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  “Liverleaf” stands out unusual from the other SRS releases, a company that prides itself on standard definition 480 and 720 resolutions and compressing features and their special features onto a packed DVD5 that creates eye artefacts on already low budget, commercial grade, inexperienced film.  Instead, “Liverleaf” has punchier colors and distinction on that segregates the austere from the vibrancy and the extra space helps allow for this decoding to be as smooth as possible on what some may now consider an antiquated format.  Decoding at a higher range of 7-9Mbps, compression imprudence doesn’t show itself here with a clean picture that retians inky voids, charted snow mounds and footprints in a white sheet of snow, and the colors and details on objects that natural enlarge themselves when in contrast, such as Nozaki’s red jacket or the red, orange, and yellow glow of house flames against the night sky.  The Japanese LPCM 2.0 stereo renders a clean mix of dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack.  Dialogue’s clean, crisp, and clearly upfront of a subdued diegetic sound mixed from the boom mic or from post and a Hisashi Arita soundtrack that scores Japanese revenge in non-traditional Japanese notes.  Post mix and action does create some separation that uncouples the visual onomatopoeia of the activity but remains negligible throughout.  The burned-in English subtitles synch well and are error-free.  Extras include a featurette from Manga to Movie that goes into the history of manga and the adaptation concept which most thought the film couldn’t be adapted, Elijah Thomas supplements with his own thoughts and opinions on “Liverleaf” as well as another featurette titled Liverleaf’s Obsession that looks at the character’s dangerous obsessive qualities, the trailer, a Oshikiri Rensuke, biography The Comically Twisted Mind of Oshikiri Rensuke with narrator voiceover going into the writer’s family history and “Misu Misō” genesis, the trailer, and talent files on Anna Yamada, Eisuke Naito, Hiroya Shimizu, Miako Tadano, and Rinka Otani.  These features house behind a static menu, that only has a play option alongside the extras, with a neat art illustration of a murderously ominous Naruka Nozaki.  The cover art hints at the film’s stark contrast aesthetics with a Naruka Nozaki wrapped her red coat and jetblack hair sprawled out on the white snow.  The Amaray does not come with a reversible cover nor any tangible extras inside.  DVD has region A only playback and has a runtime of 114 minutes. 

Last Rites: “Liverleaf” is a surprising, better-than-no budget teen revenge thriller that deals with obsession, depression, and a consternation that Haruka’s tragic journey through the pits of a lowly high school hierarchy will only get worse before it gets better.

“LIverleaf” Pushes Through the Bleak to Shine. On DVD Now!